I'm just a girl from Boston living with AIDS and addiction. Two diseases, one slogan: Silence = death.

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Sunday, bloody Sunday

A bottle of Captain Morgan Spiced Rum came crashing down on my head today. I don’t mean metaphorically; I’m speaking quite literally. I was in my garage — a place in which I don’t spend a great deal of time, because, well why would I really? — foraging through a spare refrigerator I used in the past when I used to host a multitude of people with no place to go for various holidays. My house has always been the land of the misfit toys around holidays. And that’s the way I like it. You don’t have a place to go? There’s plenty of room at my table. I’m related to no one around my holiday table, and yet they are my family in every way that counts. When I bought my first house I bought this huge, gorgeous dining room table around which I could break bread with those who meant the most to me. My grandmother sat at that table only a few times, but it is for that very reason that I will NEVER get rid of it. I can picture her sitting in the high-back chair, smiling proudly as she watched me fake my way through cooking a meal in the kitchen – a meal that, if I’m going to be honest, probably tasted like cardboard, but that she would claim was the most delicious meal she’d ever had the privilege of eating.

Anyway. I used the refrigerator for storage for the abundance of pies and fruit cakes I would inevitably end up with. Today, though, I was foraging through it to finally clean it…a task that’s well overdue. I clean. I’m a cleaner. I get anxious, depressed, stressed…I clean. I love to clean. It calms me. I usually have the music blaring in the background and if you look through my windows you’ll no doubt see me cutting a rug with my mop or vacuum cleaner as I dance around, inhaling the pine fresh scent and cleaning my ass off! I haven’t partaken in a good cleaning marathon like that in some time. I don’t have the energy. Or the will. But this had to be done. I spend such little time in the garage that I hadn’t really noticed that thanks to the heat and humidity it was starting to get a little funky in there. I needed to focus on something other than misery, so I went in to clean. I opened the door to the freezer and tumbling down from the top as I opened the door was a 1.75 liter bottle of rum. I was leaning down a bit and it hit me square on the skull causing me to bite the living shit out of my tongue, then tumbled to the floor and shattered, sending rum and glass up the length of my body and across the garage floor. After I stopped seeing stars I just kind of sat there for a minute, not really sure what to do. I had no shoes on so stepping on shards of glass seemed unwise. I could taste the rum. I licked my lips, looked around, looked heavenward and shouted “Oh you have GOT to be fucking kidding me?” Then I started laughing and after about a minute the laughter turned to sobs as I slumped to floor, my hands landing in a pile of rum-soaked glass, cutting my wrist enough to produce a thin line of blood that trailed off to the floor mixing with rum in a way that seemed heart-breakingly ironic.